


Crests and Troughs

by orphan_account



Series: Lunar Tides [2]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Abuse, Battered Person Syndrome, Drug Use, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2013-01-07
Packaged: 2017-11-18 02:32:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555911
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Why should I stay?" he asks you.<br/>You laugh at him from between his legs.</p><p>"Because you're worthless without him." you smile. "Just like me."</p><p>(Partner fic to Corona.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

You remember how this began.

Though the sopor drives holes through your head, tearing up your memory and deadening your tongue, you can remember clearly. Kankri can beat your skull against the wall as many times as he likes, break your nose as many times as he likes, even kick you in the back of your head; you still remember the exact moment everything changed. The moment nobody could take back.

_"Nobuoy even likes you!"_

It's a shout that still knocks around your head like too many rocks, drags you down and under until you're drowning. You figure that's why you cry- there's so much pressure and the water has no option but to leak out of your body. But that's not enough, it's never enough, and you start to choke. There's seaweed in your lungs and mouth and you don't know what to do but try feebly to scratch it open.

You can't anymore, not since Kankri caught you at it. Not since he put your wrists in shackles so that you wouldn't rip yourself open by your gills to _get it out_.

So the memory surfaces, sans blissful, numbing haze. The sopor can't cut through the endless dread that you feel, can't make you float up from the depths it drags you down to. Instead, you open your eyes only to see Meenah's face, only to find yourself short of words. She's purpley-pink about the face and gills and ear fins, her teeth bared. You feel yourself step back, lower your own fins, try to tip your chin down and be perfectly submissive to the only person you'd contemplate doing it for.

Her eyes only narrow.  
"Don't give me that carp, Ampora!" she yells again, making you flinch. The whole of the ball has stopped still. The music goes on, but it might as well be completely silent. You can feel eyes on you and your mouth goes dry and your palms go a little more clammy than usual. You'd wipe them on your pants, but you're too afraid of her to move.

So maybe hitting on her at her party was a bad idea.  
In your defense, you'd done it before. Lots of times! And sometimes she even laughed and made a joke or two at your expense and you got on pretty well. You didn't expect that this wriggling anniversary party was going to be any different.  
Sure, Meenah had been tense, but she was always pretty tense. You didn't expect that the dawning realization she would soon need to do battle with her ancestor would draw her patience this thin. You certainly didn't expect that she would shove you backwards into the drink table when you leaned up beside her and asked her if she wanted to cut a rug with you.

"Princess, didn't mean nothin' by it-" you say, trying to placate her, but she is all anger and agitation and she has decided that you are the straw that breaks the hump beast's back. 

"I don't give a clam what you meant buoy it!" she snaps. You want to back up, but there's no where to go. You want to shield yourself from the eyes around you, but there's nothing to hide behind. " If you want to kelp me have fin, then turn your fish tail and clamscray."

There's a moment of silence where everyone is waiting for what you have to say to that.  
You want to blame her, but you can't. You want to defend yourself, but you can't.  
Before you have the chance to say anything, she raises her voice and clenches her fists and yells: 

"Nobuoy even likes you!"

There's a collective tenseness that pervades the room.  
You look at the people you call your friends, the people you'd name as allies, and they only look away.  
Eyes- blue, green, red, orange, yellow, purple- find their place on a particular tile of the floor, on a beautifully painted vase, on the drink in their hands.

Only one pair of eyes meets yours. Bright red.  
You don't have time to think on why Kankri is the only one who is willing to bear witness.

Meenah draws her double trident and pokes you rather harshly in the stomach with it.  
"Go." she tells you. "Or so kelp me, I'll krill you, you shellfish flipperfucker."

You open your mouth and she jabs you harder.

"GO!"

So you do.

You go and you walk out of her party, cheeks and fins burning, ears still ringing, and you feel tears begin to well in your eyes.  
At first, you tell yourself that these are just tears of anger, tears of hatred. That she embarrassed you for doing absolutely nothing that wasn't normal for you, that she was totally out of line. You tell yourself that it's your friends' fault, your friends' fault for not warning you of the mood she was in, of not sticking up for you when she literally had you at weapon point.

But the more you walk, the more you think.  
The more you think, the harder the tears come.

Because you realize, as you're finally getting down to the docks, that you don't have any friends.  
You realize you only have people that tolerate your presence, that appreciate having someone who finds them perpetually attractive, pitiable, hateable.

You realize that there was only one troll in the whole of Meenah's mansion that bothered to even look at you while you floundered, and he didn't seem particularly moved by your predicament. In fact, Kankri seemed vaguely interested, as if you were some sort of show. As if her calling you down from your delusions of friendship and self worth were just another act in an opera.

You realize that you had delusions of friendship and self worth.

It's a realization that almost knocks you down on the rusting metal and time-worn wood of the dock. You slump against one of the the beams and groan to yourself, and suddenly tears are not enough to release the pressure inside of you. You are gasping and choking and making pitiful noises in the back of your throat because you cannot do anything else.  
It's too painful to dwell on the realization that you are alone.

Loneliness is the worst kind of pain.

Blows and cuts and bruises and breaks and pulled muscles and torn limbs and chipped teeth- these are all pains that are temporary. Pains that are unpleasant, excruciating, and entirely bearable.  
But loneliness is that horrible pain that gnaws you from the inside out.  
It is more virulent than the worst virus, more dire than the worst disease.  
It is the thing that makes the hollow space inside of you grow and grow until you are left moaning in a way that is only possible when you become the void that others stare into.

Before you know it, you are crawling along the floor to your ancestor's dressing room, to the closet where his clothes were hung the day he died.  
Nobody but you has touched the naval ship since your ancestor died. No salt water covered fingers but your own have opened these doors.

You open them now, though, still hiccoughing. You tear an old admiral's jacket down from it's hanger.

When you were barely more than a wriggler and your lusus left you, you came in here.  
You hid in the closet and pulled down the fantastic coats around you and you slung them around yourself. You huddled beneath them until there was only you and the lingering smell of salt water and old cologne.  
It helped the loneliness.

If that coat couldn't fill the void, at least it could contain it.

Now is when you need it's rich embroidery to cover you the most. Now is when you need the fine, tight stitching to hold you together. Now is when you need the smell of cologne and the warmth of the old, well worn lining to warm you, to cover you, to hold your breath inside of you and warm it and make you better.

But it doesn't.

You aren't two sweeps old any more. Your limbs are not small and fat.  
You are eight and a half sweeps old and the jacket now fits you.

You touch it, with some wide eyed, terrified wonder; touch the way your shoulders fill it out, the way your waist nips in.  
Slowly, cautiously, you rise to your knees. To your feet.  
You drag yourself to the mirror.

There are purple rings around your eyes from crying, claw marks on your cheeks and neck from where you sunk your fingers in.

You see a face not so different from the one that stared back at you in old photographs.  
The words your ancestor had scrawled in his log bubble up in the back of your mind:

_"You'll be proof if anything worthwhile can come from me."_

There's a soft creaking when you fall to your knees again, coming from the ancient floor boards that refuse to let you fall right through, right into the unmerciful abyss.  
You try to resist sobbing, but it claws its way out of your throat and breaks free, echoing off of the walls, gleeful of your despair.  
You were the measure of his success, you remember.

And you are nothing at all.

Yes.

You remember this.  
You remember this, sweeps later, dead to the world from sopor on the floor of Kankri Vantas's respite block.  
You remember it and try not to scream.

You do not succeed.


	2. Chapter 2

The sound rattles around Kankri's hive and you try very, very hard to stop but you can't.  
If you stop, you feel like the void inside of you will take control again.

Beneath the sound of your screams is the slick squishing noise of hands finding purchase on glass; of small, narrow feet finding purchase on stone.

A slick hand goes through your hair and you convulse, shocked to have something that grounds you to the real world, rather than the world of your memories. You open your eyes and Kankri is there, his expression somewhat agitated, somewhat endeared. You think, maybe, that he likes you like this because he likes to be the one that fills that void inside of you. He likes to be the only one to fill it.  
There's no room to argue with him.

Instead, you press yourself against his hand, against both of them when he adds the other. You're frightened to lose his touch, your anchor.  
It never occurs to you to be frightened of him hurting you when everything inside you hurts you so much more.

"Cronus..." he says gently, even though Mituna is already awake and there's no need to be quiet.

"I want. To. _Die_." you whine, unwittingly matching your voice to the volume of his.   
He wipes away your tears with messy fingers and clicks his tongue.

"I'll have to stitch up your mouth if you keep saying things like that." he tells you, and there's no intonation in his voice that he's saying it out of spite for you. He's sewn up your mouth twice before to stop you from chewing on your lips and once when he thought that you were trying to bite your tongue off and choke on your own blood. Even though on all occasions it was the sopor making you lose control of your body rather than any significant attempt to harm yourself, you can't help but feel your heart flutter at his words.

He's so good to you.

"I've already told you: you can die with me." The way he pulls you up by your hair to rest against him is forceful, but his voice remains the same placating tone. "I'll even feed you a poisoned apple, if you want. Just like your human faery stories. Wouldn't you like that?"   
When you don't reply, the hand in your hair jerks you back so roughly, you gasp. But he shooshes you and you can only let your eyes water more and reply in assent with a soft "yes".

"...Is. He always...?" you hear Mituna stutter from beside the both of you. Kankri makes that same disapproving clicking noise with his tongue. It's so odd, to know the disapproval of another just from one noise, but you turn your head and see Mituna recoil a bit in on himself, as if suddenly overtaken by shame.  
Kankri's lusus taught him well.

"You shouldn't really speak without being spoken to, Mituna. While I don't want to oppress your thoughts, you must realize that speaking out of turn could trigger someone into not wanting to speak at all." he chides gently, playing with your hair. "Think of that- someone not being able to speak because you were too selfish and thoughtless to control yourself."  
He begins to say something, but you can see Kankri's words slowly working their way in, pulling and pushing until Mituna's thoughts rearrange themselves into what he wants them to be.  
The yellow blood looks as if he's fighting with himself, hands clutching the sides of his head when he mumbles a stuttered "Sorry..."

"Oh," says Kankri, his smile so warm and his half lidded eyes so understanding, "That's alright. You'll do better next time, won't you?"

You can see the yellow flood into Mituna's cheeks, his eyes wide and glossy and completely consumed with that expression of forgiveness. It's a feeling you know all too well, one that wells up inside of you when Kankri forgives you for your mistakes. It makes you want to do better, be better...Even if, like in you, the instinct is hopeless. But Mituna, well... He still has a chance of being good, doesn't he?

He flushes deep gold as he tells Kankri that of course he'll be better, and you know he does.

People like him for a reason, just like they ignore you for a reason.  
The mark of someone's worth in life is how much they mean to others, and you already know that you are worthless. Kankri reinforced that when he found you in your hive, perigees after the party. You were beyond saving, then. There was no salvageable bit of goodness left in you, and Kankri had had to do the best he could with you.

You mean something to him.   
He loves you, even if it's only a selfless love that he gives.  
Even if his heart isn't in it, even if he only does it because he is so good that he can't stand to see you waste away meaning nothing to everybody... You'll take it. You'll take it because it's the only worth you've ever had and ever will have. You'll take it because you are rotten, deep down, to the core; because you're full of pits and scars made from the disease that reverberates through you.   
You'll take it because an empty love is the only one you barely deserve.

You close your eyes and you can remember the day he gave it to you.

For a while after your sudden epiphany, you had tried to find things to do with yourself. You had tried, for a few nights, to function like a normal troll.  
On the first night, you couldn't go out of your hive. On the second, you couldn't bring yourself to check trollian.  
On the third, you yanked your husktop from the outlet and smashed its screen in with your fist.  
You have scars on your knuckles to prove it.

Somewhere between the fourth and fifth night, you lost your ability to eat.  
On the sixth you lost the desire to do so.

By the seventh night you had amassed the small mountain of books that your ancestor had left.   
He had been one of the few trolls romantic enough to indulge in the buying of books, in the preserving of such a precious and wasteful art. 

You had held all of them close, caressed their fabric and gold leaf covers as though they were makeshift lovers.  
Delicately, you had opened old favourites: faery stories, a handful of your ancestor's logs, written in a long dead tongue.

On the ninth night you had read through all of them but one and stopped drinking, no matter how your lusus brayed and worried over you.  
Instead, you sat and opened the last book, your favourite: a book full of illustrated stories from a long since dead alien race. They were called humans, and even though they'd all eventually killed each other, you felt a sort of aching, begrudging kinsmanship with them. Most enticing was their thought of love.

Not four loves, but one.   
Two hearts, destined for each other and only each other.

It made you ache to go over all the tales, made you shiver and sigh.  
You finished the last story, one about a human version of a sea troll who sacrificed everything to be with her love, only to be cast off.  
Your eyes began to blur as you touched the page in front of you: an illustration of the young human-sea-troll turning to foam on the waves.

The days and nights became strange to you, after that.  
All you registered was that, sometimes, your sea horse would come in and curl around you, tip something to your lips, press something into your mouth.  
More times than not, it would fall or spill out and your lusus would clean your face, your shirt.

You tried to tell him to stop, but to no avail.   
You tried to tell him that you had failed your purpose, that you were too rotten to live for him.

But he persisted, persisted in feeding and watering and bathing you.   
He persisted until you had lost not only the will, but the ability to sit upright.   
It was then he deserted you.  
You had smiled at that, thought that he was doing the both of you good. You were glad that your lusus would go on and find another little grub with better prospects than you.

At least, you thought this until he came back.

But though you heard the disturbed, agitated noises of your lusus worrying over you, it was a pair of troll hands that settled on your head, turning your face over in them.  
You had heard someone call your name, somewhere that sounded far away, but that you realized was very close.

"...Cronus?"

You smiled at him, but you didn't talk back.  
You didn't talk for two perigees afterwards, in fact..

It's why he makes you talk now, why he punishes you for not talking to him. Even if it's because the sopor has eaten holes in your memory and you plain forget to do so, he never wants you to run the risk of not talking again. You know that's why he does it. 

After all... Kankri told you so, himself.  
And if you don't trust Kankri, you don't love him.  
Isn't that what those human faery stories of yours say? That there can't be love without trust?

Questioning anything Kankri tells you would be like questioning his love.  
You trust his love.  
You _have_ to trust his love.

It's the only thing you have.

"Cronus?" Kankri asks, and you open your eyes to him frowning at you, his hand tight around your throat.  
Pain to bring you back to reality.   
What did you ever do to deserve someone so perfectly loving?

"I'm sorry." you murmur, kissing the parts of his jaw and neck that you can reach while he has you in such a powerful grip. When he eases his grip, you look to Mituna. He's staring at you with wide, yellow eyes, and you only feel yourself smile as you reassure him that he will not end up like you; that he will not end up so useless and broken, with memories skipping on repeat.

"Don't...Worry," you tell him, voice warm as you can make it, "Just a. Pleasant dream."


	3. Chapter 3

Even though you can still see the light seeping in from outside through the cracks of the shutters that hang on Kankri's wall mounted glass portals, he deigns it late enough for you all to be getting up and on with life.

Today is one of those days that you usually hate: when Kankri has to travel from his lawn ring into one of the nearby trading posts to retrieve supplies. You hate spending hours without him in fright, trying not to fall into a panic as you think of what might happen if he never comes back. If he just goes one day and never returns to you. If he leaves you like the useless piece of trash you are.

It's only slightly easier with Mituna here.  
Even after a perigee and a half, he's still getting used to the side effects of sopor, but he is more comfort than you really deserve on days like this. He has learned well enough from watching Kankri how to stroke and scold and hold and hurt you so that your panic ebbs and you curl into his arms just right. Kankri has no need to lock you up in any block in his hive when Mituna is around. He doesn't even shackle your wrists on these days, anymore. He simply cuffs one to Mituna's wrist and one to yours, making certain that the two of you are never far apart.

Mituna, at least, doesn't seem to mind.

He's taken much more quickly to Kankri's lessons than you ever did. Despite being lower blooded- _no, warmer blooded, warmer blooded you incompetent, driveling sack of waste, how dare you think that way_ \- and much more susceptible to the physical side effects of sopor, he's much quicker on the uptake. Kankri hardly ever has to hit him or even scold him very much.

Even now, he proves it.   
Without having to be told or having to ask, Mituna comes over by you and kneels down and lets Kankri put his half of the shackle on. Once yours is fitted over your wrist, Mituna drags you upwards as best he can, shuffling the both of you over to the ablution trap block.

You two sit against the wall while Kankri bathes, brushes his hair and teeth. When he isn't looking, Mituna rubs small circles and gentle lines against the bony ridges of your hand. When Kankri takes his leave of you both, he readjusts his hand under yours so as to lace your fingers together. Without saying anything, he raises it to his mouth and kisses the skin he just stroked.   
Your eyes flicker to his, jerking towards the door every half second, nervous as to what Kankri might think if he saw it.   
If he saw you letting it happen.

If he saw you enjoying it.

But between those frequent ticks, your eyes return to Mituna's- to the chartreuse discs of warmth, the hoops of gold patina, focused on you. Only you.  
You shiver, frightened of what his looks and kisses and touches imply. 

When you make a little noise of panic in the back of your throat, he sighs, pushing your hand against his cheek. It's a weary sound, one that comes from well worn thoughts and frequently denied desires.  
Instead of speaking to you, he walks you to the ablution trap, helping your legs over the smooth, white sides of it when you seem incapable of properly executing the feat. He doesn't pinch you or speak harshly to you or tell you about how awful it is that you are deliberately not trying to use the capabilities that your legs have, you ableist.

Rather, he reaches over and fills the trap with warm water, water that almost scalds you and your cold blood, but forces your muscles to relax under it's molten touch. You sit in Mituna's lap, your head resting against his neck, and let him rub your skin with his free hand. He massages soap against your skin, over the dappled spots of scales that shine blue, purple, magenta. It works at the top of your gills on both your neck and then your sides, careful as he can be not to get any inside of them. 

Ladling handfuls of hot water over you, his fingers come to stroke at your spine.

He runs his fingers against the fin there, dips them into the muscles and nerve endings that surround it. You're leaning back into his touch before you even register that it's happening, sighing and shutting your eyes against the world. You might continue this way if he didn't suck in a breath, causing your eyes to open and find his face.  
It's turned to you, eyes rolling up your body the same way his hand runs up the side of your fin. By the time he's reached the top, you're sure that the gold flush in his cheeks isn't being caused by the steam in the ablution trap block any more. 

Your eyes meet and your mouth is halfway open and you feel his bulge begin to harden beneath you and the panic rises inside of you again.  
You're not supposed to say no, you're supposed to trust him when Kankri is gone, but you're also not supposed to enjoy things like this unless it's Kankri who's directing the two of you to do it. His hand slides back down to the small of your back, right under where your ridged fin ends, and he pulls you forward so that you're flush against him. You can even feel his blood pusher thump through his chest.

For a moment, you almost wish that the ablution and warm water didn't temporarily ease the ticks that sopor has given him. It would be much easier to disengage yourself, to find fault with, to turn away hands that trembled against your back, arms that jerked unpredictably when they folded around you. It would be so much easier to sit on his lap and kiss his lips if his bulge accidentally stayed asleep and his lips lost their cleverness.

It would be so much easier not to invite his kisses if his tongue didn't know how to pry apart your lips.

But then, as long as Kankri tells you not to do it, you're supposed to give him whatever he wants, listen to his every command. You had no choice of compliance to be celebrated, no sacrifice to be rewarded. Barely half a perigee of being in Kankri's hive and he swore off his matesprit and moirail. You watched, along with Kankri, as he logged onto Trollian for the last time and broke it off with the both of them. You watched as he deleted his handle and never touched the computer again, despite his love of them. He took the skateboard out of his sylladex and broke it in front of you, allowed Kankri to fit him in clothes he bought and throw away the jumpsuit that matched Latula's.

For all these things, he deserves reward.   
The reward is yours to give him.

Again and again and...  
Again.  
And again.

Until it's enough.

The problem with the whole thing is that you're not supposed to really enjoy it, you think. But before you can really get into why you're not supposed to like it, your brain goes a bit hazy and phases out and Mituna sighs and pats your cheek until you snap back to reality. He strokes the side of your cheek, eyes full of what looks to you like yellow pity. 

"Are. You...?" he asks, not having to finish his sentence for you to understand what he means. _Are you well? Are you whole? Are you here? With me?_  
You nod but don't say anything. Unlike Kankri, he doesn't mind your deadened tongue, your forgetfulness to answer.

He strokes the side of your face again, though this time, his fingers pinch gently around one of the spines in your ear fins and stroke it. You feel a guttural moan rise out of your throat like a bubble, popping on your teeth and releasing the sound of itself into the block all around the two of you. Mituna sucks in another breath and you feel his hips buck upwards against your backside. He rubs out another moan from you, fingers circling to the back of your ear fin as he pulls your face closer to his.

His lips find yours again, tongue flicking against your lower lip. You've learned that he wants you to open your mouth less so that he can claim it with his tongue and more so that he can suck the breath out of you when you kiss. He likes it, the cold dampness of the air from your lungs, the taste of something more distinctly _you_ than what lingers on the abused flesh of your lips. 

You separate, without speaking, and he allows you to curve backwards to drain some of the water from the ablution trap. There's no point in keeping it full- your genetic material and his will only make it over flow, to say nothing of how much would slosh out the sides of it. Cleaning up such messes when neither of you have both hands, complete mastery of your physical or mental faculties , an endless supply of time and towels, or the physical fortitude of un-pleasured and sober bodies, is not a particularly fun task. 

Getting scolded afterwards is even less fun.

So he lets you drain the trap about halfway down and, when you turn back, you catch him admiring your body, the way your skin and nipples perk up due to the chill, despite there being almost no difference in warmth due to the steam in the room. As you come back up to him, you try not to notice the telltale tendrils of purple that he elicits from you by raking his free hand over your gills and down your hip. You try to ignore the way your body clenches around nothing but water, aching and ready and willing for something more substantial to fill it.

He slides a bit more down the lip of the ablution trap, just so that his bulge is under your nook, the swollen flesh of both making you rock against him, hoping for more. You feel his hand guide the tip of his bulge into you before he rocks forward, causing you to fall back against the lip opposite to the one he'd just been leaning against. One hand behind your hip, the other still holding your hand, he presses the fullness of himself into you.   
Your body accepts his advances in the most brazenly pleasured way.

Though it can't compare with Kankri's heat, he still burns hot inside of you. The warmth makes the walls of your nook want to relax, but every pump and thrust causes you to clench around his bulge more, to lay your neck against the lip of white porcelain and make pathetic keening, trilling noises. You have only the most basic sounds left to you as he uses you, as he milks his pleasure from your body.   
He lowers both of your hands, fingers laced, down and around your own bulge, chases your lips with his.

And so it goes, with him rocking against you until the whole of him is fitted inside, until he's buried to the hilt into you. From there, it's all rolling motions, all the pulses to your nook and tugs to your bulge that force a million obscene noises from your mouth, that make him growl possessively. Just like you had both gotten accustomed to come in time with Kankri, you'd gotten accustomed to come together.

The trap is filled with swirling spirals of purple and gold when he finally slumps against you, completely and utterly spent.

You tip him back gently, sliding up to him the way you were before. Opposing colours of genetic material cling to your arms and neck and chest as you slide back up between his legs, your hands finding his chest. You kiss his mouth without putting too much effort into it, your lips sliding against one another as good as gets. You feel his blood pusher skip a beat when it happens.

He sighs and you settle against his chest, perfectly content to let the water and genetic material around you twirl and combine. It will eventually be an orange brown owned by other trolls naturally, but that's alright. For now, it's the colours of passion and pleasure, the colours that remind of the warm breath on your hair and the hand that slides on the back of your neck comfortingly, affectionately. Silence stretches between the two of you before he sighs again in that same, tired way.

"I. Love you." Mituna tells you.  
You sigh, closing your eyes.

"I. Know."


	4. Chapter 4

It's a long time before either of you move again.

Your personal reluctance to move is matched to Mituna's: pleasure and exertion have a tendency to make one weak and tired, and therefore make it much more desirable to fall against your lover than to stir and do something productive. There are times you manage to slip into a period of light, brief sleep against him, soaking in the warmth of his body more than the warmth of the water. 

When you start from terrible dreams due to the lack of sopor in your system, he makes quiet little noises against your hair and strokes you with the arm not chained to yours.

Though one hand proves his fingers laced with yours, squeezing very softly, as if to remind you that he's there, the other hand moves across your back. The fingers on it are warm and rough, but tapered and much more delicate than Kankri's hands. They dip against the raised, whitened flesh of your scars and trace smooth, even strokes across your shoulder blades. Your skin prickles and you shiver on reflex, but he never does anything to harm you. He simply sits and strokes and kisses your hair, mumbling something you don't focus on understanding.

When he finally moves, he makes no effort to get you off of him. 

In fact, he sort of hooks your unshackled arm around his neck and mumbles with that weird lisp for you to hold on to him. You dutifully tighten your arm around his neck and he bends the both of you awkwardly, draining the ablution trap once more. He rinses the sides, using his hand to splash water onto any remnant of your messy copulation.

You watch it spiral down the drain a little wistfully.  
You really like reminders that people want you.

Mituna though, a human god bless him, tries his very best to keep you close and comfortable, tries his best to let you know you that you at least mean something to him. You don't really understand the sentiment, you don't understand why he feels the need to hold you and do you any favours when he's done using your body, but it feels awfully nice to be held. Even if you don't really deserve it.

His movements when he washes you this time are a little less jerky and a little more heavy- the sopor from last night is wearing off, but that doesn't make his system clear of it. Still, his hands shake less and the way he kisses against your neck gills and your shoulders with firm determination as he rubs genetic material off of your skin makes you eternally grateful for the lapse. 

You wonder if that sort of thinking is something you ought to be punished for and start to claw at some of the scabs Kankri left with his sickle a few nights ago. There's purple running in gushes from your leg before Mituna realizes what you're doing and places your hand back on his own neck.

"I. Wish you wouldn't." he tells you, struggling to string the last word together. Multi-syllabic words are a little difficult for either of you on a good day. Trying to talk through the ravages of heavy sopor use is like trying to talk with a large ball of ice on your tongue.

You see his face screw itself up as he looks at the wound. You know from experience that this is the look he gets when he's trying to decide whether or not to do something. Thinking can be even harder than speaking when your thoughts are disjointed, and you know he must feel the frustration of not being able to link together thoughts rapidly as frustrating as you do. Maybe more.

He lifts his hand towards your leg and you think, for a moment, that he might be considering digging his own claws into it like Kankri might. No, though. His hand only hovers above your thigh, as though he were waiting for something to happen. From the way the creases in his face get deeper, from the way his eyebrows draw down so sharply you feel they might actually touch, from the way his face colours and his teeth clench, your body tenses, waiting for whatever is causing him this excruciating amount of thought, of concentration.

You do not expect it to catch you as off guard as it does.

A sharp pain, much more acute than anything you have felt in a very long time, shoots across your flesh in a way that surprises you so much you scuttle back from it. Well...That is to say, you try, at least. Mituna, grabs your leg with one hand, pulling you towards it as well, and returns the other over top of it. You watch with watering eyes as little sparks of red and blue form at his palm. 

You're sure that you're only seeing things at first, because sometimes when Kankri hits you very hard you see stars, but the sparks grow into strands and the strands form a twining funnel.

When it connects with your skin again, you try not to scream, but it hurts badly and all you can really do is hope to muffle it by burying your mouth against the side of your arm. There are actual beads of sweat breaking out across Mituna's face by the time he finishes, panting with exertion. He lifts his hand, arm shaking from how tightly his muscles were clenched, and starts to laugh.

"What?" you question dimly, looking from his now-barren hand to him and back again. 

When his mirth finally dies down, he points to your leg. The skin on it is still singing with soreness, and to be really honest with yourself, you don't want to look at it for fear that it's damaged irreparably. For a moment, you're shocked that you even feel fear any more, at any sort of damage to yourself, just as you were shocked at how much you could really hurt. But Mituna's patience runs through and he grabs your hand and puts it over top of your leg before you can really think to hard about it.

You offer a tiny yelp of pain when he sets your hand down. It feels like you're touching raw nerves, painful and tight, but... But it feels dry, and you look down with no small amount of amazement.

Your cut has been cauterized shut. There's no scab over it, even, just a smooth, angry line of tissue that you know will scar some day, but for now is dry and smooth. It takes a few moments for the idea of having a closed wound to finally catch up with you, but when it does, a strange, gurgling sort of laugh bubbles up with it. 

You feel almost excited.

It wasn't all that long ago that Kankri had had to cut off a chunk off one of your fins because a wound there became infected. If Mituna can close the wounds after you get them, you won't have to worry about whether or not Kankri will have to take it upon himself to dissect infected chunks of flesh. You won't have to worry about whether or not you'll become entirely useless to them. 

Smiling sort of hurts your face, but you're doing it when you look up at Mituna. He's smiling, too, but not at you. He's still looking at his hand with that odd fixation, with that odd, determined expression. Again, you look from his hand to his face to his hand and try to suss out what such excitement could mean, what he could be so enraptured with. You look back at your leg and furrow your brow in concentration and try very, _very_ hard to think about what he'd done, about why he would be more excited than you that he could close wounds.

You remember the colour of the sparks and you look up into his eyes and then your jaw slackens a little and you feel your eyes go very wide.

"Oh." you say, feeling very much like you might dissolve in the scant water of the ablution trap at any moment. He smiles back at you, fangs uncovered and eyes bright in a way they haven't been since before the very first time he joined you and Kankri. 

You have an odd feeling in the pit of your stomach that this change makes him dangerous, that it is something that you should warn Kankri of. The trouble is that Mituna leans into you and chooses that exact moment to kiss you in a way that you've never been kissed before- with excitement, with passion, without finesse.

In that kiss and in that moment you know you will not tell Kankri.

You know you are completely and utterly doomed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Going to try and work hard to get this finished by the new year. Thank you all for your patience.  
> ((Really sorry for the double post. My AO3 page got weird on me. Thank you to who ever mentioned it to me!))


	5. Chapter 5

There is something in the way that he dries you that has you wishing you had the key to the syringes and sopor Kankri uses for the both of you.

He keeps taking deep breaths and going little by little against your skin, steadying himself before he proceeds to the next part of your body. When he wipes at the skin on your face and gills, his eyes do a funny thing that makes your bile sac sort of gurgle and your collapsing and expanding bladder based aquatic vascular system- wait... _heart_ , you mean _heart_ \- pump faster.

He moves slowly, but his hand still trembles. It's with a great deal of mental lag that you realize he only began to tremble due to the fact that his focus is less on his muscles and more on your face. You feel the burn of violet on your cheeks, all the more potent as a single drop of water falls from your eyelashes over the hollow of your eye socket and the swell of your cheek bone. Mituna makes a noise that you think is half way soothing and half way self indulgent and rubs the drop of water away with a shaking thumb.

Considering that your legs are still rubbery when he finishes and you are very dizzy from what you have spent the last hour trying desperately to convince yourself is just the heat of the steam in the ablution block, you are very relieved that Mituna takes it upon himself to prop you up against him as he guides the both of your bodies back to your shared respite block. 

Kankri's hive is not particularly large, but it isn't particularly small, either. Though it's nothing like the multi-tiered labyrinth of a ship that you were raised on, it's still got two floors and a staircase that requires at least half an hour of your time to navigate on a very good day. You are unspeakably grateful that the one thing Mituna has always had on you was a sense of how to move on land, because even with your weight working against him, he manages to carry you up the stairs in half the time of your best efforts.

The tricky thing of it is that he doesn't have near the natural leg strength that you do. By the time you two reach the respite block, you fall over each other in a messy, sweaty tangle of limbs and it doesn't seem like the ablution did very much for either of you at all. He breathes in those shallow, wheezing breaths he always gets when any amount of physical stress is put on him, but instead of annoying, they're soft and sweet against your neck fins and you find them involuntarily flaring, reaching out for those tiny puffs. 

You wait until the sweat on your skin has all but evaporated before you turn your head to look at him.

When you do, you realize that he's slipped into a faint doze. You don't want to interrupt it, but the sound of your movement or breath or _something unspeakably annoying you do_ wakes him anyway. The mental berating that starts in your mind comes to a screeching halt when his eyelids slide open very slowly. He's absolutely, fantastically lovely in the faint glow of Kankri's recuperacoon; his eyes are glossy, his hair somehow...softer? What was the word for cluckbeasts and songbeasts? 

You think.

Feathery.

Yes. His hair looks feathery.  
That sounds about right.

You test a lock of it between your fingers. There are no pupils in his eyes, but you can see the roll in the glossy light reflected off of them when they move to follow your hand. You don't know what he's anticipating, but you must do something right because he releases a small breath when all you do is drag your fingertips along the strands of hair. It's soft and warm and you don't realize that you curl your fingers into it before you're up against him, nose buried into it.

"...Cronus?" he breathes.

It's gentle as can be, but it sends a shock like boiling oil down your spine and you tear away from him so quickly that you forget about your conjoined state. The shackle pulls against the raw, agitated skin of your wrist and you give a small scream of frustration. You don't realize that you've begun to claw at your throat and face until Mituna is on top of you, attempting to hold your flailing limbs down.

He whispers to you in the most unobtrusive, unobjectionable way possible, noise and cheek against the side of your face. They're small words that he frequently stutters and stumbles across. They mean nothing, and yet the fact that he's bothering to whisper them to you, you of all creatures, of all lamentable, worthless creatures, somehow cuts into your duress like a sword. 

The feeling of him against you is indescribably awkward. He's smaller than you by a few inches and you still have muscle on him, even as wasted as you are. The trouble is that his whispers and his warmth and his weight and his pity all pile on top of you, penetrate you, slay that screaming monster inside of your head that won't let you have rest. You feel the self hatred bleed from your chest and leak through your eyes and you make terrible moans of pain.

The creature you are on the inside tells you you don't deserve any of it. Not pity or hate or anything of value.

You couldn't agree more.

But then Mituna shifts his arm to hook around your neck and slides his chained hand into yours. He kisses the gills on your neck while you sniffle and cover your eyes and beg for Kankri to be back. You want someone to fuck you as hard as you hate yourself and then fuck you even harder. 

Too bad your life isn't about what you want any more, though. Mituna only kisses you and continues to lisp and stutter sweetly into your ear. Eventually you run out of tears to shed and sounds to make and you shift the both of you until your faces are even. The kisses that he gives to you begin placatingly docile and then slide into something that makes even his chest begin to flush slightly yellow. You feel his bulge stir against your hip, but when you move your hand towards it, he unhooks his arm from around your neck and laces your fingers with his. Instead of rutting against you, he only holds your hands and kisses you more.

They're not as excited but they are every bit as passionate as the kiss he gave you in the ablution trap. The problem is that these kisses are many and that the heat of them, the feeling and emotion of them wears your already whittled emotional fortitude down to nothing. You can't cry, but your body still makes those odd pre-crying sobs that make Mituna look at you with wide eyes. He asks you in a very genuinely worried way what's wrong. You can only sob again, ratcheting little noises as you try to breathe and connect sounds to ideas.

" _Die_." you choke out.

He sighs and settles his chin on your chest.

"Not. Going to. Kill." 

You sob again. He kisses your throat. When you squeeze his hands so tightly you feel that your bones might meld together, he squeezes right back.

"Pre.Ci. Ous." he sounds out, kissing along your pulse in an intentionally lazy way. "You. Are preci. Ous. To me."

Mituna decides to illustrate this point by taking your conjoined hands, tapping your chest with them, then tapping his. He kisses the back of your hand before he pulls you up by the both of them and shifts your bodies so that you're laying on top of him. In a way, it's the cruelest thing that he can do, holding you. It's an action only made crueler by the false admission.

Of course it's false. You know that innately. You are not worthy of hate or pity or-

He kisses you again, until the both of you are breathless. You only get one gulp of air before he kisses you more. Again and again until your lips go numb and you're too tired to fight the attention he lavishes you with. Your body goes weak against him and he coaxes small sighs of pleasure from you with nothing but the force of compassion. A headache blooms from dehydration and lack of sopor, but he murmurs and kisses you and smoothes his warm hands across your brow in a way that makes the white lightening pain recede to a dull ache in the back of your skull.

Despite your own intimate knowledge of how worthless you are, you do feel precious. You feel loved. Pitied. You rest against him, between his legs, and let him stroke your hair and face, pretending for just a moment that someone could have those sort of feelings for you. You're content with that, really. You're content with whatever physical or emotional need he impresses on you. 

You're fine with being a substitute, even if he doesn't know he's using you as one yet.

You're sure he'll realize that eventually.

So you lay there and let him take out his affections. You let him dote on you with words and gestures and try not to think too hard about what they mean. It's almost a success, too, because you're just about to fight back the headache you still feel rolling around in your skull with sheer determination not to be conscious when Mituna interrupts your efforts. 

"Why don't. I just..." His finger wraps around one of the curls your wavy hair makes, "Take you?"

"You..." Your mind staggers for a few moments as you think hard about why he's asking your opinion. You decide he must be really desperate to talk to somebody in Kankri's absence. After all, you are technically a better option than Kankri's lusus. "...Can?"

There's a moment where you look at his lap, utterly confused. His bulge isn't even hard. It's honestly baffling to you why he would ask to fuck you in the first place, but especially when he's not aroused. His expression mirrors your confusion before he realizes something. You hear him grumble with no small amount of frustration as he figures out how to reply.

"No. Mean.Ing..." He says, being very exact in his pronunciation, "Why don't. You and I just... Run?"

"...Away?" you ask. It occurs to you faintly that your voice sounds very small.

"Yeah." 

He runs his hand through your hair again, petting you. Your hair is thick and coarse as any sea dweller, but Mituna does you the small mercy of making it seem like he enjoys feeling it beneath his fingers. You try not to shiver at his words and at his touch, but you fail miserably on both counts.

"...Can't."

"Not with. Me?"

That elicits another shiver from you. The muscles in your arms twitch, you gnash your teeth without meaning to. Ultimately, you're too tired to do anything as destructive as you really deserve, but Mituna goes right back to whispering soft little shooshes and stroking your face.

You'd die without the both of them.

Kankri is everything that keeps you going. There's no one who can match how much you hate yourself, who can use the self destructive force inside of you against itself as well as he can. 

But there's no one who pities you for absolutely no reason at all like Mituna does. There's no one else who can speak words that run through you like sopor, no one who can kiss you and touch you and make you feel the hatred inside of yourself recede.

You sob a little and Mituna kisses you.

"I... I need. Both." you hiccough.

He strokes your hair and tightens his arm around your shoulders. For a long time he remains so silent that you think maybe you could drift off to sleep against him. But at long last, he opens his mouth.

"If. I leave...?" 

It's an open ended question that you don't know how to respond to. You don't know if you could handle him leaving the respite block right now, much less leaving the hive. Leaving you. And Kankri. But... But you have to admit ashamedly that you're mostly frightened of him leaving you.

"No!" 

"...Why. Should...I stay?" 

You stare at him, mouth slightly agape. He looks back at you, trying to keep his expression straight, but you can see in his face that he's looking at you for an honest answer. You think about how much he's given up, how much he's already suffered in order just to be here with Kankri and you. Something bubbles up in your chest that at first you think might be another strange, dry little sob, but comes out as laughter instead.

It's been a long time since you've laughed. It doesn't sound like you remember it. Human hell, it doesn't even feel like you remember it. It's the sort of thing that starts up in your lungs rather than in your belly, that rattles your body so that you slide down back along Mituna's hips and thighs. You laugh against his bulge and that sort of causes you to laugh even harder, until you manage to push your face up into the junction between his hip and his leg so that you can actually breathe. 

Everything hurts and he stares at you like you're completely mad. 

Considering the lilting, howling laughter you hear bouncing off of the cavernous respite block, maybe you are.

"Because... You're...Worth.Less. With. Out... Him." you smile. Your lips are stretched out so far your face hurts, and you know he can see all the teeth in your mouth. It feels grotesque and you know from his vaguely concerned expression it must look it. 

"Just. Like. Me." 

Every word is enunciated just as clear as you can manage. You punctuate them by pressing your long, thin fingers into his throat, tracing the gills he doesn't have. He shivers and you can tell by the way he looks at you that Kankri's warning not to talk to you when you're thin on sopor is ringing around in his head just like a headache is ringing around in yours.

You laugh again and have one moment of terrible, horrible mental clarity.

"You. Need. To save." you laugh at him, making a final jab to the soft underside of his chin. "Can't. Save. Without. Kan-"

He puts his hand over your mouth before you can finish, mouth pressed into a firm line. For a moment you think you might have done it. You think you might have actually managed to tap his seemingly unending source of patience and forgiveness with your stupid, utterly horrid thoughts. But when he moves he only lifts you towards Kankri's recuperacoon, propping you against the wall while he puts his unchained hand against the barrel of sopor beside it. 

In the green glow of the machine, his face creases and his hand is alight. There's that same double stranded light that sears into your eyes when you look at it. Your headache roils inside of your skull, but you don't shut your eyes against the near-blinding psionics. You silently watch as they grow brighter, brighter than when he fixed your leg. 

There's only the smell burning metal filling your nose, making your stomach turn over in knots. When he's contented with his work, Mituna takes away his hand, dipping it into the concentrated sopor inside. He wordlessly kneels and lays you against his chest. 

You don't protest when he carefully guides the sopor into your mouth.


	6. Chapter 6

It's nights before Kankri returns.

Mituna tries to cope the best he can, but he's really no match for your mood swings. If there were one thing that Kankri, mutant blooded - _no, fucking warm blooded, differently blooded you fucking indecent heathen_ \- knew about the castes, it was that he couldn't expect a violet blood to be decent or good in their natural state. He knew that the sharp edges of your blood had to be whittled down with blows, that the coldness of it had to be warmed by the incandescent glow of sopor running thick in your veins.

He knew the only way to tame the vitriol of your blood was to draw it out of you, bit by bit.

Poor Mituna, you think to yourself. You pity him all the more that he tries the first few nights to take you off of sopor. He refuses it himself, has since the night Kankri left. You see him in the throes of withdrawl, the pain utterly unimaginable as he writhes in pain, clutching his head. There's a night when the two of you don't leave the ablution block at all, where you just spend the entire time biting and kissing Mituna's stomach and back as he vomits brightly coloured bile into the load gaper.

He woke from his exhausted sleep only when you began to scream at the top of your lungs. You didn't even realize you were doing it until he dragged the two of you back up the stairs and ladled more sopor into your mouth with his shaking hands. You had kissed him, the sopor on your tongue deadening any taste bud that might have rejected the flavour of bile and blood.

It took two days and three nights, but eventually the sopor lost its hold on him. Within four nights he could carry you up and down the stairs without even having to walk. You became accustomed to the glow of red and blue around you, to the strange cold-heat of psionics cradling you in their grip while Mituna cradled you in his arms. 

He had tried all the time to be gentle and kind to you, but when all was said and done, it was the psionics that allowed him to keep you alive. It was the psionics he used to bind your body so tightly that you couldn't flail or claw at yourself. It was the psionics that shut your mouth from screaming bloody murder every time your mind cleared even a remote amount and you realized that Kankri hadn't returned to the two of you. It was his psionics that pried your mouth open so that Mituna could shove food and drink and sopor down your throat, forcing you to remain alive even when you wanted to drop deep into the ground and never wake again.

The psionics, the only amount of brute force he possessed, were all that stood between you and self annihilation.

By the sixth day, even those seem not to help much.

The hysteria inside of you seems to fall through the ground, taking any speck of your will to live right along with it. Mituna spends time walking around Kankri's hive, taking inventory of everything that's there. He broke the chain that connected the two of you on the fifth night, but that doesn't stop him from taking so many breaks in his inventories to check on you that it seems you're still attached.

You don't resist anything that he does, not even on instinct. He still manages to feed you, bathe you, clothe you... But all of that seems to not matter. The days trickle by you in strange ways, sometimes fast and sometimes slow. There are many moments where the sopor he feeds you allow your senses to dance between hallucination and reality, between dream and wakefulness. 

Many horrible moments come to you where you think you see Kankri. When Mituna makes him disappear, makes him an obvious phantom next to something living, you feel tears well at the corners of your eyes and fall down your face. 

By the ninth night, Mituna carries you around with him always. His words drift in and out of your ears. He speaks to you in a steady stream of thoughts, narrating what he's doing or why you should be happy that Kankri isn't back or how much he loves and pities you, but you have no more the ability to absorb any of it than he has the ability to change his blood colour.

You can't exactly explain why. 

You can't explain why the strange hallucinations of Kankri bring you so much joy. You can't explain why any time Mituna moves you near the front door to Kankri's hive, you begin to sob terribly like a frightened little wriggler. You can't explain why your body is wasting even more than before when Mituna is feeding you, loving you, doting on you more than Kankri ever considered doing.

The only thing you know is that you feel worse than you ever have. You feel worse than the night Kankri found you, worse than any night before or since. Everything is so numb and so unreal that you feel as though you have an ice flow running through you and there is nothing that you can do but let your body go into shock. Sopor doesn't warm you from it. Even when Mituna tries to coax pleasure into you, tries to jerk you off or eat you out or fuck you, you feel nothing at all. 

Not even his warmth.

Nothing.

It's only on the eleventh night that you rise back to the surface world.

"We'll have to leave. Soon." he tells you, his mouth against the gills on your neck. His fingers stir in your hair, disentangling themselves from his sleepily possessive grasp. "There's only a few more nights of food left in here. If Kankri doesn't come back-"

"He. Will."

The words cause him to jump, eyes wide. He cringes at the ripping noise from his fingers tearing strands of your hair loose from your scalp, but your expression remains impassive. You can only feel the cold dread welling in the pit of your stomach. His hand strokes your hair as he considers how to speak to you.

"...Of course he will. But in case we need more food, we have to be ready. We can't starve waiting for him."

There's a moment of silence between you two as he waits for your reaction. You stare blankly at the ceiling.

"We. Won't." You insist, though your voice is as blank as your face. You hear the ice water your pulse has turned into creep up into your voice. Your lips go numb from it. "He'll be. Back."

" _Cronus_." he sighs heavily, massaging the bridge of his nose. 

"He. Has to." 

Your voice breaks when you say it.  
Mituna sucks in a breath of air and realizes the meaning of your statement. He pulls you to himself.

"I know you don't want to believe it, but... It's possible..." He bites his lip when a sob ratchets its way out of your throat. "It's possible that maybe...Maybe he's just...Bored with us. Maybe he left-"

" _No_!"

It works almost like magic. 

The door downstairs bangs open loudly and it smacks you out of whatever lack of consciousness you've been having. Suddenly everything seems very real and you realize that you are very sore and very tired and very, very excited. 

But there's a screeching from Kankri's lusus that makes your stomach twist oddly, makes both you and Mituna curl on yourselves defensively. There's something innately territorial and _wrong_ about the way Kankri's lusus sounds. You both recognize the screeches of not a cranky lusus, angry at it's young charge for not feeding it in quite some time, but instead the defensive cries of a guardian protecting its singular brood.

There's the sounds of snapping from its claws and more screeching, followed by a sickening crackling sound that brings both you and Mituna to your feet.

Vertigo grabs you by the skull and shakes you, causing you to almost collapse against Mituna. He's used to this by now, however, and catches you without even taking his eyes off of the staircase. There's a keening noise coming from down stairs. A second crunch.

Nothing.

The stairs creak, but you know instinctively that the troll on them is not Kankri. Something inside your gut twists again, more violently, and you feel yourself bare your teeth. You don't realize you're growling until Mituna shooshes you very gently, very quietly, and rubs your shoulder to make you relax.

"'Tuna? Honey pot?" 

The voice is definitely not Kankri's. It's too light, too airy, too effeminate. 

"Mituna? Baby, please... We're here to help you!"

Your lips curl when you recognize the voice. Mituna's jaw drops just a little and he freezes where he is, unsure of how to respond. When you start towards the stairs he holds you back with his psionics, walking forward himself. It almost looks to you as though he is in a trance, completely unable to free himself from the clutches of the voice calling to him.

"...Tulip...?" he calls back. His voice is small and broken and utterly choked with emotion. 

There's the sound of feet running up the stairs. A curving figure with long hair nearly blocks out the light from the hall, but it's replaced when the troll it belongs to launches themselves forward into the room. 

You notice the thick lips and the long, glossy hair. You notice the curled eyelashes and large eyes that soft-teal tears leak out of in fat drops. You notice the arms of a teal and black jumpsuit as the troll pulls Mituna to herself in an embrace that you can only assume would be classified as "crushing".

A name comes to you.

Tulip.

Latula.

His old matesprit.

The revelation comes in a detached way. You stare at her with blank eyes. She's so overcome with joy that she doesn't seem to notice your stare at all. The psionics around you allow you to drop to the ground as she pulls back from over Mituna's shoulder to kiss him on the mouth with all the passion and heat he deserves. You can practically see the red bubbling up through her chest and leaking out her lips with how flushed it is.

A tiny sob bubbles up in your mouth.

It causes the two of them to jump, just as you and Mituna had earlier. Latula spins around, drawing a cane sword she inherited from her ancestor out in a defensive gesture. 

When she finally notices you, she goes stock still. She leans forward, eyes squinted as she tries to decipher your features in the strange semi-light of the recuperacoon. You see the teal eyes behind her glasses drink your appearance, note every scar, every pit in your skin, every bruise and bone. For a moment, a look of intense pity crosses her features. You realize, self consciously, that she's gotten more beautiful with age. 

Even when she finally looks at your face, finally recognizes you for who you are, and her lip curls with disgust, she is more beautiful than a human faery story.

"Whoa. Like..." she says, looking you up and down, " _Ick_." 

You curl in on yourself, suddenly ashamed of your body, aware of every flaw. Mituna and even Kankri reassured you many a time that you were still attractive to them, still useful. The teal blood's judgement of your state reinforces their kindness towards you. Of course they lied to make you feel better. Of course.

"Er..." Latula says awkwardly, one hand still on Mituna. She glances at you, then at him, then back to you. "...Sorry?" she offers to you. You don't say anything. She shouldn't have to apologize to you. She's better than you, anyway. You're in no place to be making judgements about her judgements on you. 

Deep inside of you, the beast howls and claws its way up into your chest.

"Come on, 'Tuna." She tells Mituna, still standing there, staring at the two of you in front of him as though you're ghosts. "Kurloz is waiting for us downstairs. We'll bust some radical moves and have you back where you're safe in no time at all. I promise. We've even got..." 

A chill runs through the two of you. You both stare at her.  
She seems to notice the change in the air, because she holds off on the name.

"... Whoever is responsible. We're going to make it all right, baby." she croons, hugging him again. "It's going to be all right. We're here for you now."

You feel your fingers curl into gargoyle-like claws. You feel your lips pull back in a snarl.  
You also feel the psionics that tighten around you as your muscles coil, ready to pounce on the teal blood and rip her throat out.

Latula tugs on Mituna's hand, ready for flight, but he stays rooted into place. When she asks him what's wrong, he only looks at her somewhat vacantly and asks, in the voice of a wriggler:

"What about Cronus?"

Teal eyes scan between the two of you. You watch her brow furrow in confusion. Her bottom lip pokes out in deep thought, just the same way as it did all those sweeps ago, and she even blows a puff of air upwards into her hair in the same manner. 

"I..." she starts, nibbling her lower lip. "'Tuna...Honey pot... Nobody cares about-" 

She looks at you apologetically, then back to Mituna.

"... We came for _you_ , honey."

You thought you were broken before.  
You thought you were broken as much as a troll could be. As much as even a human could be.

But you were wrong.

Something inside of you breaks at her unfinished sentence: _Nobody cares about him_. That's right, you suppose. Nobody would have come for you. Excepting Mituna, nobody came for you before. Nobody ever asked about you. You know because nobody except Mituna talked to you when you'd ventured out with Kankri and Kankri always made a point of telling you that nobody inquired about you when he went to visit old friends and left you at home.

Logically, you have no reason to be upset by the statement. You've known for sweeps upon sweeps now that nobody cared if you slipped away into oblivion. Nobody cared if you were beaten and starved and cursed at and spit on every day of your life since Kankri had taken you in. Nobody cared if you got addicted to sopor. Nobody cared that you needed it to cut the longing for affection, the longing for love, the longing to be something to someone. 

Anything.

To _anyone_.

You only notice that you're crying when you feel Mituna's hands on your face. He's even more gentle than you remember him being at any other time, his fingers wiping away your tears. He makes tiny little shooshing noises, but they're only for calming, not for really directing you in any way. Your legs collapse under you.

You fall to your knees and sob into Mituna's legs, bowing your head and neck and back under the immense pressure of inferiority, of self loathing. He and Kankri are all you have. They're the last remaining trolls in the whole of existence that you offer any use to, any utility. They are the only ones kind enough to want you, divine enough in their mercy to give you a purpose.

Without them, you are nothing.

There's no way to tell Latula that. You hear her shift uncomfortably as she watches Mituna bend down to embrace you, to let you lay your head against his shoulder and pepper his shirt with your tears. A million thoughts about whether or not this constitutes infidelity with Kurloz must be rushing through her head, you think. She looks for a moment like she might break the two of you apart, but the words fall dead on her tongue when you look up at her and she stops where she is.

Mituna, noticing your sudden tenseness, turns and looks towards Latula. She flounders for a moment, caught between her affection for the gold blood holding you and for the loyalty she holds to the indigo blood down the stairs. Soon enough, the former wins out, and she only presses her mouth into a thin line when Mituna gathers you up in his arms to carry you down the stairs.

"He can't walk so well." He explains, and that seems to take some of the tenseness out of her. 

You cling to him as he walks behind her down the stairs, your mind racing with a million disjointed, hazy approximations of plans. Truth be told, for all the modifications Kankri did to you to make you more docile and less of a danger to yourself, you're betting that you could probably tear her throat open with your teeth. If you really tried.

Even humans could do that, right?

But Mituna senses all of your tenseness. He shooshes every noise you make, holding you tightly to him with his psionics where his arms might fail. Your stomach nearly drops out of your body of its own volition at the thought that you might have to hurt him to protect Kankri. You honestly don't know if your loyalty can be split to one side or the other. 

You try to tell yourself, for a few long moments before you reach the carnage at the end of the staircase, that perhaps the court will be merciful with their judgements on him. Surely the worst they'll blame him for is the damage he's done to Mituna, and that's not so much, is it? No, you think, Mituna is just fine. Wonderful, really. Still handsome. Still intelligent. Still able. 

However, these reassurances die as quickly as they were born when you reach the bottom. 

There is blood as far as you can see, spattered everywhere. You assume that most of it is from Kankri's lusus and the dripping, massive clubs that the indigo blood you assume to be a more aged version of Mituna's former moirail is leaning on. You tense in Mituna's arms at the sight of it and he tenses around you. There's utter silence as you both scan the room for any sign of Kankri.

There almost isn't any until you hear a muffled groan from down near Kurloz's foot.

"Don't you worry, my fine, fluffy headed friend." Kurloz smiles at Mituna. He has entirely too many teeth for you to be comfortable. "Next time, the blood isn't going to come from a lusus."

"Kurloz!" Latula chastises him, for the sake of how pale Mituna is getting. The indigo blood shrugs his now-massive shoulders, the paint on his face taking away from what might normally be an apologetic expression. "Sorry, Latula. Just stating facts. There's no way this mother fucker will get out of a good old fashioned clubbing at dawn is all I me- _Augh_!"

You barely realize what you're doing until there's blood spattering up from Kurloz's face in an arc. It hits your skin, just slightly warmer, as you drive down the blade you snatched from Latula's hands once more. This time you only catch his arm, but it's enough for him to stumble and fall back from.

Kankri rights himself with an amazing amount of speed. You hand him the sword, bowing your head meekly. For a moment, you hear and feel Latula and Kurloz look at each other in confusion at your loyalty. 

Their brief lapse in attention is all Kankri requires. If you're entirely honest with yourself, he's always been the model of a prince like you never were: exacting, strong, romantic, cunning... And _fast_. He takes advantage of the time it takes Kurloz to swing his club at either of you. 

By the time he's on the down stroke, Kankri's already opened his stomach with Latula's sword. You hear the slick _skish, squrisk!_ of blood and entrails leaking out of him. Turning to him, you only manage to catch him collapsing, both hands clutched over his abdomen.

Latula lets out a scream and jumps forward, but Kankri's already brought a second slice down on Kurloz's neck and you know there will be no saving him.

The teal blood manages to land a solid hit to Kankri's jaw, causing him to drop the saber in his hand. For a moment, he's all shock, allowing her to land a round-house kick to his throat and send him flying from the living block into the nutritional preparation block. He's only getting up as she picks up the sword, but anger and distress make her miss in her swing with it and it only hits his head with the side of the blade.

You and Mituna watch as Latula raises the sword, driving it into Kankri's arm. He punches her solidly in the ribs, cracking at least two audibly and sending them flying away from each other, each unbalanced.

Latula's sword skitters to Mituna's feet.

He looks at you.

You look at him.

Kankri and Latula are both staring at Mituna as he picks up the sword, each seemingly under a spell at the sight of him picking it up, each doubting his state of mind, his loyalty. You stay still, listening to the last gurgles of life as Kurloz chokes to death on his own blood, body unable to heal his wounds and mind unable to heal the physical shock.

Mituna stands straight, not looking at Kurloz or you or even the two opposing parties in front of him. He only looks at the sword, at the way the blade shines dimly in the light. He raises it in front of himself, tipping the back of the blade to his forehead in deep thought. A veil of silence falls over the four of you, broken only when Mituna lets out a sigh.

He lowers the blade to his side. Your stomach ties itself into knots as he walks over to Latula, smiling gently, lovingly, and puts his free hand, the one unencumbered by her sword, out to help her up. 

"Tulip." he says gently.  
"Oh..." She breathes. You can see the tears collect in her eyes, even from behind her glasses. She lets out a shaking laugh of relief and joy. "Oh, honey pot!"

She takes his hand.

The moment their fingers touch, there's a blinding light. An acrid smell like burning hair and skin fills your nose. Smoke blurs your senses. There's a wet, crunching sort of sound, like a wriggler falling the wrong way or being crushed by an inept lusus. The hair on the back of your neck and your arms and legs all stands up, as if drawn to the light. 

Light.

Electricity.

Red and blue.

It recedes, but you still have to blink a few times to make out the yellow blur of Mituna standing, his arm still outstretched, eyes fixed on the ground in front of him. You blink again and follow his line of vision. There, on the ground before him, is the figure of what used to be a lovely, lovely troll. You can still make out the curves of her body, a few locks of long, shiny black hair clinging to her scalp. She's covered in burns, her mouth hung open in a scream that was never released.

You're grateful her eyes burned right out over her sockets when she died.

Mituna swallows roughly. You can see the glaze of tears in his eyes, but he only shakes his head and stands up completely straight, his back like a rod. Without saying anything, he takes a deep breath and turns to Kankri. Just the same, he leans down and offers his hand. Kankri's eyes dart to Latula's corpse. He knows the gamble, the gravity of the situation.

It is the first time you have ever seen Kankri shake with fear.

His fingertips connect with Mituna's, and you close your eyes. For a moment, you brace yourself for the glow, for the cessation of your entire world. You wait. And wait.  
But your world doesn't end.

You hear the grunt of effort that Mituna has, helping Kankri to lift himself off of the ground. He's solid as a brick, you know from experience, all muscle, and it's quite a bit of weight to heft with one arm. You smell burning flesh and hear Kankri scream as Mituna slides his hand up Kankri's arm, sealing the wound, but it dies away as soon as it comes.

As soon as he can, Mituna breaks away from Kankri. He pointedly does not look at Kurloz or Latula or Kankri's lusus. He only looks at you, only makes a bee line towards you. Mituna fixes a knot that holds Latula's saber, then uses both his hands to pick you up under the arms, to bring you to your feet. 

"Shhhh..." he whispers, again wiping away tears that you were unaware were falling. "I've got you. We've got you."

You let out a tiny hiccough of relief and throw your arms around his neck, kissing him. It's a strange second when you realize that you're kissing him passionately, kissing him needily, kissing him with everything that you are and everything that you have. You kiss him like you've never kissed anyone in your life, and then you do it again for good measure.

Kankri shifts, walking out from the nutrition preparation block. His eyes are wide as he stares at the two of you. You see jealousy, you think, but also an understanding of what has just transpired. A desire but an inability to be angry with either of you for your joy in each other's presence, for your mutual comfort and love. He looks at Mituna, hand still on his arm, over the recently cauterized wound.

Mituna clears his throat. 

"We're leaving here." he says. It's not a statement you or Kankri can argue with. His voice doesn't leave room for it. Neither does his recent display of psionic power. Dual protests die twin deaths on yours and Kankri's mouths.

"If you have anything you want to...Bring along," he adds, "Get it now."

It takes a long second for you and Kankri to come to the same realization: he means the both of you. You look up at him, jaw loose, but he doesn't take his eyes off Kankri. He squeezes you tighter as Kankri looks at him questioningly, suspiciously, his beautiful red eyes narrowed a little. Kankri walks over to the two of you, never breaking eye contact with Mituna.

"You're still mine?"

"No." Mituna says. You see the way Kankri's fists tighten, prepared for a fight, but Mituna draws him into a kiss, enfolding him in the arm not holding you. It's not passionate, but it's deep. A gesture of safety, of mercy, of... Of everything he is, of everything he has to give.

When they break apart, he draws you two together in his arms, a wry smile on his face.

"But you're still ours."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


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